Aspiring professional history nerd. Likes to masquerade as a creative writer mind when there is no baseball to watch.

Jul 8

recovering suicidal

Every morning, I wake up. It is one of the few things that I have accomplished every single day of my life.

I wake up, and I get my coffee. I preferably brew it myself at home — black, no cream, no sugar, and somewhere my grandmother is proud of me. When I can force myself to eat something, I toast a bagel and spread cream cheese on top of it. I do not measure out the cream cheese.

I go about my day. Lately, seemingly all I do is get dressed, go to work, and repeat. Sometimes, I get lucky and have an off-day. I’ll go to the ballpark, the zoo, on a mindless walk to nowhere.

I move through life clutching to the intensity of the true strength and weakness that I wield within myself.

If you have never decided that you have wanted to kill yourself, words will never properly convey the true nature of the situation. They will never accustely grasp the desperation, the terror, the determination — and, somehow, how they intertwine together to produce the most misleading, dangerous sense of clarity.

There’s also a fantastic likelihood that I’m not a good enough writer to meticulously capture the decision. I’ll concede that.

When you decide to kill yourself, however, you don’t foresee yourself failing at the mission. You never picture yourself alive at the very end, waking up again and again and over and over. Survival isn’t just inconvenient; it’s absolutely astounding. It’s confounding.

I have spent years figuring out how to approach this reality. I don’t know how to grapple, to cope, to forgive a decision with such powerful ramifications. How, exactly, do I come to terms with such an action? How do I compartmentalize it? How do I move on?

I have never figured it out. I don’t even realistically know if I have the utter tenacity to figure it out. As the years unfold and develop, I find myself without an answer, and the situation continues to permeate into every corner of my thinking, of my life.

Here is something so powerful, so wonderful, so awful — how can I even begin to approach this?

So I hold onto it.

The decision nestles in the back of my throat, at my fingertips, in the pit of my stomach. I carry the secret with me with a twisted assurance. “I know what I am capable of,” you think to yourself. “I know what I can do.”

It is both pride and terror.

I can do this.

I can do this.

It is my weapon and my curse.

I am as powerful as I am weak.

I wake up every morning. I have for the better part of two decades now.